There were so many ponytails on the pitch during the England-Sweden game on Friday. Are ponytails for men actually back?

Katharine, south London

Well, Katharine, your question suggests that the styles donned by footballers have any connection to fashion trends. Were that the case, the Chanel Couture runway would be dominated by Maharishi trousers and string vests, a look I once saw with my own, poor eyes sported by none other than Dwight Yorke in Manchester airport, a sighting that did little to explain to me why footballers are seen as "idols".

I'm trying to think of a single example of a footballer starting an advisable fashion trend. As Victoria Beckham realised after Baden-Baden, the only way to be fashionable and even tangentially connected to the football world is to dress as if you have nothing to do with it. Hence she swapped hair extensions and hotpants for Hermès and Louboutins, upgrading her wardrobe from Jordan to Jackie O.

Ponytails, however, show no such awareness. If anything, they demonstrate the opposite, an embrace of the most cliched of all footballing looks in the mistaken belief that "cliche" is French for "classic".

I learned much from Friday's match. About the male ponytail, anyway. First, I learned that Swedish for ponytail is hästsvans, which sounds worryingly close to Häagen-Dazs: a connection that both amuses me and grosses me out.

Second, I learned that the yearning for a ponytail is no exclusive to notoriously style-challenged English footballers. Zlatan Ibrahimovic did his best to destroy Sweden's aesthetic reputation with a ponytail even more nightmarish than the assembly instructions for an Ikea bunkbed (legal requirement to mention Ikea in any article about Sweden now fulfilled).

And finally, I got an insight into the mentality of the average footballer. The ponytail, I now see, sums up the very essence of the footballer. His tao, if you will. The ponytail is the tao of the footballer.

I've never understood why so many people are fascinated with soccerball players on a personal level. Overpaid, arrogant, boorish, sometimes possibly racist, bafflingly fond of Dubai as a holiday destination: who are these people? And who are these people who care about them on a level beyond: "So did my team win or not?"

Now, though, I think I have parsed the matter.

A man with a ponytail is a special kind of man. He is different from a man with a tattoo because tattoos, while awful, are not (sadly) completely anachronistic. Some perfectly respectable people have tattoos (Johnny Depp … um, gimme a minute) whereas absolutely no respectable man has a ponytail. A man with a ponytail lives within a specific bubble, one constructed from arrogance, a lack of awareness about the modern day, an absence of interest in the opinions of others to the point of near sociopathy and fantasies based on what machismo meant in the 70s. In other words: a footballer.

This is not to say that other sports do not flaunt bad hairstyles. Lord knows cricketer Kevin Pietersen has done his best to degrade that most stylish of sports and don't even get me started on certain baseballers. But football, for all of the reasons above, provides a more fertile ground in which men's ponytails and alice bands sprout.

So what does this say about the sport's fans? Well, I'll tell you. These fans are not arrogant sociopaths, like their idols. But many of them – the thirtysomething-plus crowd – do, it seems to me, have quite a 70s concept of machismo, not necessarily in their own lifestyles but in their acceptance of it in their idols and the way they use their childhood memories of the sport to blinker themselves to football's massive over-corporatisation today. Let's face it, no one can love football in its current state: it's a love that can only be built on memories. Love of football, especially English football, more than any other sport I can think of, is rooted in fantasies of the past rather than the reality of the present. The past, when male ponytails were the pinnacle of cool and when a footballer with long hair was the cool cat on the scene as opposed to the muppet with the tail.

And that, Katharine, is why ponytails will always be popular in football but never, thank God, in the real world.